Planning committees are political. Don't let councillors tell you they aren't.

 

This is the first in a series of posts responding to questions and issues raised at my recent Battle of Ideas debate about the housing crisis. These posts will touch on how planning committees work (and whether they are political), why we need council housing, but it won’t solve the housing crisis and the old chestnuts of empty homes, brownfield sites and food supply. I’ll also try to set out why beauty is a good idea but looking good doesn’t stop NIMBYs and how urban sprawl is what people want.

One person in the audience raised the issue of NIMBYs and how politicians are too scared of organised opposition to housing. This person made reference to a housing development in Shoreham-on-sea where hundreds of local protestors campaigned against a development because one – just one – tree would be cut down. A fellow panellist, Rabina Khan, leapt to the defence of planning committees because she’d sat on the committee in Tower Hamlets that refused a major housing development to save a single mulberry tree. Rabina Khan, the former councillor on the panel, set out to explain that, of course, planning committees listened to objectors, but they weren’t political. Khan explained that councillors sit on the committee in an impartial (she managed to avoid the commonly used but misleading term “quasi-judicial”) role free from all that nasty politics and guided only by planning rules. The inference we are supposed to take from Khan’s description of the planning committee is that councillors aren’t influenced by NIMBYs.

You will, when you’ve stopped laughing, have spotted the flaws in Khan’s claims of councillor impartiality. It is true that Blair’s local government reforms removed the political whip from planning and licensing committees – we can no longer do what we did when I was first elected and have a group meeting prior to the committee where we decided how we would vote. But the idea that politicians stop being political just because they sit on a committee in a personal capacity is obviously nonsense. And when several hundred folk from a councillor’s ward turn up to object to new housing, please don’t tell me that this doesn’t influence said councillor’s view on the development.

The entire planning process, from the designing of the local plan through to deciding what goes to committee and what doesn’t is entirely under political direction. Even when the decision of the local planning authority is appealed by the developer, the process is ultimately political – it is the secretary-of-state who decides the appeal and they can (and do) ignore the recommendations of the planning inspector. It is because the process is political that people would come to me as a councillor to get help with their planning – from trying (unsuccessfully) to get permission for a hay store in a horse field to supporting a new bungalow on a farmyard in the green belt, I’ve dealt with hundreds of planning applications where residents faced initial rejection from the planners.

The de facto politicisation of individual planning decisions created problems that the Blair local government reforms didn’t fix. These problems ranged from the worst sort of corruption through to using planning and licensing to create a sort of agency/client relationship between councillors and residents in urban inner cities. At the heart of this is the idea, almost unique to the UK, that every planning decision must go through this political process. Not only does this invite abuse, fussbucketry and jobsworthiness but is creates uncertainty and delay. Since, in theory, politicians must approve every dormer bedroom and conservatory, the planning system acts to prevent people from meeting need, from starting businesses and from improving their property especially in communities where people are uncertain of the actual powers available to councillors.

My father who was a councillor in London for 30-odd years always argued that planning decisions should not be made by councillors but, once the plan was agreed, by officers subject to the oversight of the courts. While this wouldn’t eliminate the arbitrariness of the current discretionary system, it would introduce a little more consistency and give applicants more confidence. Rabina Khan was wrong, planning committees are political, political considerations like votes influence planning decisions, and NIMBYs exploit these facts to prevent new housing, new infrastructure and new facilities.

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